Will only knowing Wanikani's naming conventions hurt me if I choose to go to language school or learn Japanese in Japanese at some point?

I have a lifetime subscription and don't regret the purchase, but I do think it's important to mention that those first 10 levels are the best it'll ever be. They make regular improvements to the early levels since they get the most use. As you get further in you'll both see a decrease in the quality of the content and start to recognize the flaws in their methodology.

I had a teacher when I was doing handwriting practice that would tell me the name of a kanji's radical I couldn't remember how to write in japanese, and then she'd draw it on her hand and I'd be like "oh that's the booty muncher radical on wanikani" and there would always be this short miscommunication. So I don't think it would be a completely absent problem if I were learning entirely in japanese. But you're probably right that it wouldn't impact my learning significantly when I think about it.

> you don’t need to learn the official radical names to learn and use Japanese.  You certainly don't, but learning them does make things easier, and if you're a language nerd you'll pick them up anyway. I went to language school in Japan and at the advanced levels, the teachers would regularly point out the 〇〇かんむり and what not.

When I went to language school in Tokyo, at least in the advanced class, we learned 10 new Kanji every other day. Basically it was 10 new Kanji on one day, then review those 10 with a mini quiz on the next. This was at the beginning of every class for about 15 minutes, then the rest was grammar. I can't speak for every language school, but at least in the advanced course, there are so many chinese people that I feel theyve decided its mostly unimportant to hyper focus on it. With that being said, we did not learn the names of the radicals at my school. However, my chinese friends I made in class that could speak decent english, were willing to break down a lot of the patterns you see in kanji to differentiate some similar but different kanji. For example, 待 and 持 were 2 I had a bit of difficulty with. Looking back, the difference is obvious, but at the time when our tests were every 2 weeks and it was 100 questions, 50 writing the kanji and 50 writing the reading of the kanji presented. I was a bit overwhelmed and overlooked things. All this to say, at least at my language school, kanji was more of a situation where you were given a guided and broken up study guide to study on your own as opposed to anything else. https://www.amazon.com/Kanji-Practice-Minutes-Day-vol/dp/4757420129 This was the book we used. Also the slower class was pretty much half speed. 5 kanji a day and a test every 2 and a half to 3 weeks.

Wait you went to a japanese language school in japan and you told them you didn't want to learn to handwrite the kanji? From what I've researched, language schools expect you to do your homework by hand. Did you like type all your assignments?

> The radicals have actual meanings. 1) They're not radicals. They're components. 2) Half of the components are used purely for their phonetic purpose and have nothing to do with their meaning. Also the phonetic matching only works in Han Dynasty China, 2000 years ago in a different language, so who knows how it works in modern Japanese. 3) Even when the meanings were chosen explicitly for a given meaning, they've changed and merged and split and evolved over the millennia that half the time it doesn't even match anymore. 漏 almost looks very obvious, you got rain inside a door... except that's 尸, which is for corpses, not doors which is 戸, so who knows why that's the way it is. Is it that 尸 can also mean door? It probably does from this case. But having "door with a bonus stroke" vs. "door" is not nearly as easy to distinguish in memory as opposed to "door" vs "corpse". Whatever level of kanji ability you have (unless you somehow happen to be one of the ~5 English speakers who have Kanken 1kyuu), I guarantee you that I know more kanji than you do, by a pretty wide margin. And even I don't know the "actual meanings" of anything except the most common components that are typically used in 形成 (亻・木・糹・辶・艹, and like, maybe 15-20 more at most). Whatever link 慮 has with 虎, I don't know. I do know that 虍 is called とらがしら, despite the fact that it's clearly a たれ and not a かしら, and it probably gets its name from the fact that it appears in 虎 and not the other way around. Or maybe there was some reason in ancient China. I don't know. I don't care. It doesn't reflect modern reality. Not even the Japanese name it by whatever meaning it has. >There is zero benefit to calling it "triceratops" or whatever. Ease of rememberability. Mnemonics are good and should be used. Wanikani does tend to use the actual meanings of components when doing so is actually useful (as in the cases of the short list I posted above). I don't even use wani kani, but like, going by the actual meanings of the actual makeup of the kanji is only sometimes a decent approach to memorizing kanji. Whatever mnemonic that sticks to your brain is almost always better.

Just to provide a different take: > No Japanese teacher I've ever known has ever brought them up At advanced levels (N2 and up), all my teachers would regularly reference them. > Most Japanese people don't even know what a lot of them are called In my experience, any fairly educated Japanese person will know pretty much all of the standard ones.

>Most Japanese people don’t even know what a lot of them are called To be fair, this part at least has not been my experience at all.